I'm interested to find out what is generally considered best practice for using air conditioning. My car is a 1.7 petrol honda FRV, I'm not concerned about mpg but am interested to learn what approach is most sympathetic to the air conditioning system.

To put this into context our car is used mainly for local urban journeys with occasional longer runs at the weekend. We fortunate to live close to work, schools and church and most journeys are less than 5 miles/15 mins each (Yes we do use bikes when we can). We don't have any specific need to run the climate control all of the time although a wet pram in the winter will increase the need.

Does the on off nature of our driving mean we should generally leave the climate control on or off.

Cheers.